Abdulrazak Gurnah

Abdulrazak Salim Gurnah (born 20 December 1948 in Zanzibar) is a Tanzanian novelist and academic of Yemeni origin who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021 'for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee'; he left Zanzibar as a refugee after its 1964 revolution and settled in Britain, wrote ten novels including Paradise and By the Sea, taught at the University of Kent until his retirement, and since September 2024 has been a professor at New York University Abu Dhabi ^{1 2}.

Gurnah was born in the Sultanate of Zanzibar into a merchant family of Yemeni origin; as a teenager he lived through the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution that overthrew the sultan, and in the late 1960s he came to Britain as a refugee, studying up to a 1982 University of Kent doctorate before teaching in Nigeria and then at Kent, where he became professor of English and postcolonial literatures ^{1 2}. No text read names a faith for him: 'of Yemeni origin' is ancestry, and the Muslim East African worlds of his novels are his subject matter, so his faith is recorded as unknown ^{1 2 3}.

His first novel, Memory of Departure (1987), began a sequence that includes Paradise (1994), shortlisted for the Booker and Whitbread prizes, By the Sea (2001), Desertion (2005), Afterlives (2020) and, after the Nobel, Theft (2025); the novels circle exile, migration and the memory of German and British colonialism in East Africa. In 2021 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and on 1 September 2024 he took up the Arts Professorship of Literature at New York University Abu Dhabi while remaining emeritus professor at Kent ^{1 2}.

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